MX Linux Forum

Remember... Murphy both dotes on and despises you at the same time.

@AltairIV

oops, I forgot to add that before you do your fresh install, use the MX tool called "User Installed Programs" to save a list of the programs in MX23 that you installed yourself (ie, they didn't come with as default with MX23). Save that uip file elsewhere.

After you have done your fresh install of MX25 preserving home, you can open up User Installed Programs in your new MX25 install, feed it that saved uip file, and it will help you install with a single command most of what you had installed in MX23.

Exceptions -
1.flatpaks [anyway, once you are in MX25, there could be a newer native version of the program that works well for you so you might not need the flatpak version anymore ]
2. native programs from MX23/Debian12 repos that are no longer found in the MX25/Debian 13 repos
3. things you manually installed from external deb files.

asqwerth wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 7:01 am @AltairIV

oops, I forgot to add that before you do your fresh install, use the MX tool called "User Installed Programs" to save a list of the programs in MX23 that you installed yourself (ie, they didn't come with as default with MX23). Save that uip file elsewhere.

After you have done your fresh install of MX25 preserving home, you can open up User Installed Programs in your new MX25 install, feed it that saved uip file, and it will help you install with a single command most of what you had installed in MX23.

Exceptions -
1.flatpaks [anyway, once you are in MX25, there could be a newer native version of the program that works well for you so you might not need the flatpak version anymore ]
2. native programs from MX23/Debian12 repos that are no longer found in the MX25/Debian 13 repos
3. things you manually installed from external deb files.

Many thanks, you have been very helpful.

rambo919 wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 6:52 am Remember... Murphy both dotes on and despises you at the same time.

We should all, as a matter of priority, devote ourselves to the cultivation of equanimity and the freedom it bestows from the vicissitudes of other's opinions
........and remember to 'tie up the horse', just in case.

FullScale4Me wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 1:02 am ....sysV ..... A project as small as an init process with 4 people maintaining seems to have a better than average future IMHO.

actually I can remember using Slackware and Pat living in the mountains got sick and no-one knew what was happening. The wikipedia suggests circa 2004. So I am not sure there is merit in saying a small number of maintainers has any merit....even if the code base is small IMHO
But I agree that the number of distros that use sysV far outweigh runit.

Adrian wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 9:28 pm systemd doesn't depend on UEFI. I recommend using UEFI if the machine is capable of that but it's not something you need. Using a 14 year-old machine for KDE is a pretty good stuff... You should set up a swap space though, even a small file based one.

When I built this thing I went as spec heavy as I could stand and afford without going crazy, hoping to make it as obsolescence proof as possible. I've since doubled the RAM and added an SSD, but otherwise it's straight 2011 vintage. I've thought about building a new one but the way this thing has performed I haven't been able to justify it. Of course, nowadays I don't push it nearly as much as others do. It's mostly just an Internet browsing appliance.

Weird that QSI didn't find my swap. It's there, 10GB. Just checked it with gParted. <shrug>

Maybe it's not enabled what does "swapon --show" shows?

rambo919 wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 5:56 am I can only find one vague incident where the guy says FFS started destroying his ext4 externals... no mention of systemD

400gb folder I lost after systemd dbus error wasn't in the ffs list though and it was a systemd dbus error reported, not ffs ... I'm just saying what was happening at the time data lost (ffs sync and me plugging in a usb). Had used ffs for a couple of years with sysV and no data loss, but as soon as to a systemd distro, lost data. Rarely post online, so the 'guy' wasn't me. I just started using grsync instead, as an aside, as various issues pointed to systemd problems, so the best thing was to return to sysV, despite issues with other things in distro.

rambo919 wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 3:30 pm

Nokkaelaein wrote: Mon Aug 04, 2025 3:23 pm Heh, it's relative how "early on" you are talking about here :), good to remember Wayland is an older project than systemd.

It only really became a war once it was obvious corps started actively attempting to strangle xorg.... no one really knows why they chose silent violence but that doesn't really matter I guess.

If wayland was a complete viable total replacement... I doubt it would have mattered. Too many things just don't work on it though and the devs are oddly militant.

In 10 years it probably wont matter anymore either way but the rumors of the death of X11 are still wildly exaggerated.

2025 has been a wild year for random FOSS wars, I kinda wait in anticipation for whatever drama comes next

The devs are the normal Gnome morons who have been like that for the entire 26 years I have used GNU/Linux. They think they are Gods gift to the earth and it is their way or the highway for anything they touch. They are fully controled by the parasite corporations and have been for some time. They push the corporate agenda of controlling/subverting this until until they have taken total control of its direction to favour the money making interests those corporation seek and to close it down a much as possible. You just need to look at the moves Redhat have made to see the direction they want to take it, then add in the Microsoft efforts at subversion thorough the systemd moles they had in there for the longest time until they felt comfortable enough to go home to the mother ship and not even pretend anymore. They openly brag about such and such a percentage less unix in releases.

asqwerth wrote: Tue Aug 05, 2025 6:24 am

The installer allows you to do a fresh install of MX25 with the option of preserving your /home. That's where the settings and config files from Thunderbird, Firefox, and other apps are stored. Assuming also that you had a default set up of Thunderbird, I believe your emails will be in /home, though you should check with someone who uses that program. As for docs, assuming they were saved in /home, preserving home will preserve them.

HOWEVER, the warning we always give is that before your carry out the fresh install, you should back up all the important stuff in /home to a separate storage device. Firefox and thundebird settings and stored emails can copied over to the backup storage device.

Common sense precaution.

Your thunderbird default is the ~/.thunderbird directory for its settings and firefox is the ~/.mozilla directory. And as always backups, backups and more backups is the idea and an untested backup is useless until proven to be good.